Oh, we forgot to fix the voting machine problem - again.

Here we are, less than 2 months short of another sure-to-be-a-narrow-margin election (???), and the people who are responsible for election fairness have just woken up after 22 months in a Rip van Winkle-worthy coma to notice that we haven't done anything about the problems we saw in the last election. And the one before that. And the one before that. And the one before that. And, at risk of repeating myself, the one before that. Indeed, the "improvements" that were introduced after 2000 made it impossible to provide any valid evaluation of vote counts, nor did they address the many thousands of disenfranchised voters who are, yet again, going to be left out in the cold.

A study in Florida two years ago proved that Diebold machines were eminently hackable by a reasonably competent programmer, just by modifying the code on the magic chip, and that such a change would leave no trace but would accurately pass its "fixed" numbers all the way up the chain.

In New Hampshire, as mentioned in my last diatribe, the executive director of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee paid people to jam the phone lines so voters could not get directions to their polling places. In Ohio, thousands saw the doors close in their faces because machine breakdowns slowed down the voting process too much. In Florida, thousands were struck off because their names matched those of felons (sounds a bit like the no-fly list, another Republican masterpiece).

And now we have 6 weeks to get it all fixed. Oh, sorry, that's not enough time, we'll just have to live with it as it is. Still, it's good enough, isn't it? After all, most states show a difference of more than 10,000 votes and we can't be that far wrong (can we?). And in those other states? Well, they do tend to be the swing states that make up that elusive 270 electoral vote number but that's just co-incidence. Isn't it?

As that great democratic leader Joseph Stalin said, "It's not the people who vote that count, it's the people who count the votes."